Artwork capturing influential historical figures who wore glasses

SIR – Laurence Gretton’s letter (May 13) suggesting that Edmund Burke was the first public figure to be pictured wearing spectacles is out by at least four centuries.

The earliest documented painting to feature spectacles is a fresco in Treviso (dated 1352) depicting Cardinal Hugo of Provence, albeit a century after his death.

At the British Optical Association Museum, of which I am curator, we have numerous 15th-century woodcuts and prints of important bespectacled historical figures, including Edmund Burke, as well as artists, popes, saints and villains.

By the mid 18th century it was no longer a novelty to see people wearing glasses, although many public figures still today remove their glasses for the photographer.